The Grand Hotel

by Gregory Day

  ‘We have a cooked breakfast every morning up here in winter and right through into spring,’ Rennie said. ‘Warms you up. It’s brass-monkey weather up here most of the year.’

  ‘Yeah. So I gather.’

  Breakfast was finished off with a third straight espresso from the Gaggia, an Amaretti biscuit each but no further clue as to the reason for my visit. Instead, the little tortoiseshell cat was re-acquainting herself with me under the table and finally got up the gumption to jump onto my lap. ‘Marilyn, you naughty little starlet,’ Lee said, as she began clearing away the plates.

  ‘She’s no starlet, baby, she’s a slut,’ Rennie said, smiling and sucking breakfast dregs from his teeth. And then, ‘C’mon, Noel, I’ll show you the brewery.’

  We walked out a door at the opposite end of the room to which we came in and now I was struck by the secluded beauty of the property. With no security fences, cameras or dogs on this side of the house all you could see for miles beyond Rennie and Lee’s sloping paddocks were the tree-clad hills. Even in the clear sunshine the hills retained their fuzzy lines as they rolled away into the west, one after another, going higher and higher off into the Otways where finally they took on a Himalayan, almost mystic cast.

  Off to our right and below were the impressive spur and signal-hut where Rennie told me he slaughtered his sheep. And a couple of hundred metres or so to our left was the eastern fenceline of the property, beyond which it was all national park to the sea. Lower down the slope of this fenceline I could see another shed, not an old bush-pole and tin job like where the cars were parked but a recently assembled olive-green kit-shed, quite large in area, nestled with its back edge up against the national park trees. Rennie pointed to it and nodded. I gathered that’s where we were headed.

  As we approached from the high side of the shed, I could see a tall stack of wooden warehouse pallets and the bobcat Rennie had mentioned over breakfast, with a forklift attachment on it. Although he had never delivered his kegs to me on pallets, I thought nothing of this detail and was keen to head inside the shed and inspect his set-up. But when we arrived at the door, Rennie paused rather than heading inside. Again I was too timid to enquire as to what was going on. After all a man could meet his maker on a remote outlaw property like that, and no one would be any the wiser.

  Now Rennie stared into the mid distance, back up the slope and past the house, and then dug into the front pocket of his jeans and produced a packet of chewing gum. ‘Want one?’ he asked bluntly. Of course I accepted his kind offer.

  ‘Now, Noel, you’re not gonna like what you see in here but I’m showin’ you for your own good, okay?’

  I gulped, as quietly as I could. ‘Okay,’ I replied. ‘Whatever you reckon, Rennie.’

  ‘It’s just that that cunt Greg Beer’s been sniffin’ around – well, he’s been doin’ more than sniffin’ around actually – and you and me, well, we’re both gonna be affected by this.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  He muttered something under his breath that I couldn’t make out and then turned and opened the shed door.

  For a moment I was confused, as Rennie flicked on the light in the shed. I’d expected to see a brewery set-up, with steel vats, bags of barley, hops, yeast, troughs, hoses, kegs, but instead all I was looking at was a concrete floor covered in pallets full of slab-boxes with the brand XXXX on their sides. Of course XXXX is the traditional beer in the state of Queensland, named in the colony’s early days when the Queenslanders apparently couldn’t spell ‘beer’, but what the hell was Rennie Vigata doing with a shed full of it in the foggy Poorool hills?

  And then I twigged, in one blinding cataclysmic flash, to the whole disastrous arrangement.

  There must have been sixty slab-boxes on each pallet in the shed, and I reckon there were at least a hundred pallets in there, stacked on top of one another. What I was looking at was not a soulful locavore microbrewery but a black-market XXXX warehouse. My jaw hit the floor as the full significance hit me. I turned to Rennie, who was staring at the pallets, chewing aggressively on his sugar-free gum. I said nothing, waiting for him to start the conversation. He wasn’t forthcoming. So eventually I said, ‘I gather that’s not Dancing Brolga Ale there in those boxes.’

  Rennie set his jaw, lowered his dark forehead and shook his head solemnly. He started to explain.

  It seemed that I’d been taken for a ride, and not just a short ride round the block but back and forth and up and down the east coast of Australia from Victoria to Queensland, and time and time again over the course of the last few months. Rennie confessed that he had never ever brewed one single drop of The Dancing Brolga Ale that the clientele of The Grand Hotel loved so much. The closest he’d come was watching Lee design a phoney logo for it on her computer back in the house. Rennie had suspected that the existence of the logo would put everyone off the trail, and he’d been right. The power of branding had triumphed over the so-called discerning alcoholic palettes of the whole of Mangowak.

  That lovely colourful etching of the brolga in full prance, which Rennie now told me Lee had pinched off the internet, and the Dancing Brolga slogan, ‘Dance your way to the bottom of the glass’, which they’d also nicked off some poor anonymous bush-poet’s website, were a stroke of devious genius. The supposed purity of the marketing had allowed Rennie to take up an opportunity put to him by an old mate, a fellow crook up in Brisbane. Apparently this bloke had found a source of more cheap XXXX than you could poke a stick at. The irony was that due to the boutique beer market and the modern drinker’s penchant for cloudy chemical-free pale ales such as Little Creatures and Coopers Green, there’d been less of a demand for the old fashioned XXXX in the last couple of years. The XXXX brewery had begun production of a few different recipes in order to stay in touch with contemporary tastes but had a little too much of their old staple XXXX in the warehouse as a result. Their solution, and very enlightened it was of them too, was to donate a whole surplus warehouse full of the stuff to various fundraising charities, and in so doing placate a lot of humourless do-gooders left over from the maniacal Temperance Guild days of the colonies’ early years. They shipped this mountain of old-school XXXX, palette by charitable palette, to an off-site pre-fab on the edge of Brisbane, where the grateful and surprised recipients of the company’s visionary largesse were to pick it up.

  The thing was, Rennie’s no doubt omniscient mate got wind that there was an unwanted lake of beer in a lonely thistle-bordered warehouse on the edge of Brissy and he decided he could do everyone a favour by finding it a good home. His only problem, or so he reckoned, was that the ‘good home’ needed to be somewhere well and truly out of Queensland. The first person he contacted was Rennie. He knew Rennie and Lee had recently been sent into the Poorool fog to chill out for a while but all he wanted was a lead, the name of someone who could handle it, someone who could get the beer offshore or squirrel it away somewhere lucractive down south. There was a large amount of money to be made, and he didn’t want to muck it up by making a false move in a hurry.

  Well, as Rennie told me in the shed, the very day after he’d received the call from Queensland someone told Lee down in Minapre about the new Grand Hotel’s search for the Recommended Loosener. The light bulb went off in Rennie’s head and straightaway he drove the black beast out to the supermarket in Colac and bought himself a few slabs of XXXX. Then Lee designed the logo, they siphoned the contents of the XXXX slabs into two sleek looking Schaefer kegs and entered the entirely fictional Dancing Brolga Ale in our tasting competition.

  Well, this was embarrassing. As Rennie unravelled the story for me, I went from pale-faced stupefaction to crimson-faced fury and finally to blushing pink like a virgin. There we had sat, back in the new Grand Hotel dreamtime – myself, Darren, Nan Burns, my brother Jim, Ash Bowen and Joan Sutherland – sipping the very best handcrafted beers Australia has to offer, carrying on with our ‘expert’ opinions, searching quite puritanically for the beer that most resembled the
pick-me-up qualities of a fast running Otway brook. And what did we come up with, after we tasted exquisite coriander and ginger beer from third generation brewers in Gippsland, delicious pale ales from Benedictine monks in Western Australia, highly potent and effortlessly drinkable ales and stouts from the eastern Tasmanian riviera, and clear refreshing lagers from Broome and the Top End? Yep, you guessed it. We awarded the semi-lucrative prize as The Grand Hotel Recommended Loosener to a mass-produced chemical-laden XXXX whose key ingredient was the grain of salt you had to take it with.

  And not only did we approve of this bullshit furphy beer then, we’d been approving of it ever since. Talk about a bunch of romantics! Each week when Rennie and Lee would roll up in the black beast full of Schaefer kegs with the stylish aubergine rubber rings on their tops and bottoms, my mouth would salivate at the prospect. And I wasn’t alone. The thought of yet another great week in The Grand Hotel drinking beer brewed from the creeks up in the hills behind us was a life-affirming prospect. If anyone had ever cast aspersions on the quality of The Dancing Brolga Ale, either I or Joan Sutherland would’ve banned them for life. But we never did hear anyone complain. Instead we heard the whole gamut of alcoholic accolades, from traditional Aussie ‘you beaut’s and ‘top drop’s to twenty-first-century mumblings about the enigmatic pleasures of umami and terroir. It had gone on for months, night after night, and now I stood with Rennie, despondent and humiliated in the kit-shed source of the sham.

  Or should I say ‘scam’? Coz that’s what Rennie had pulled off here, and all at my expense. He had made literally tens of thousands of dollars out of me and my pub. The audacity of it was breathtaking.

  Spying a stool beside a workbench on the far side of the shed, where thirty or so of those now pretentious looking Schaefer kegs stood waiting to be filled with XXXX, I said to Rennie, ‘Mate, I think I need to sit down.’ He just nodded gravely and watched as I crossed the concrete floor.

  I sat on the stool, leant my elbows on the bench and rested my cheek against the palm of my left hand. I was sitting in the exact same position as the figure in the famous Cezanne painting ‘Boy in a Red Waistcoat’, except unlike that boy there was no hint of a smile on my lips, only a bewildered gaze. And anyway I’m sad to say that this was no time for art, even despite the fact that Rennie had been so creative. I felt like a fool and I was one. After my redeeming vision of the brolga in the old camp in the bush, I simply hadn’t been able to resist a beer by that name. It had all seemed preordained. And now I wanted nothing more than to shut my eyes and for the world to go away: people, beer, paintings, ocean, the lot.

  Rennie walked over and feebly, for him, offered me another chewy. This time I refused. I never wanted to accept anything from this hairy-headed gangster ever again. The chewy was probably made from the bone marrow of dead racehorses for all I knew. No, first things first. I had a few questions for him, especially now that I was sitting down and could cope with the potential shock of his answers.

  For a start I asked him if he’d ever, at any point in his entire life, had a mother. Automatically his underworld brows lowered at this insult but I could tell he wasn’t gonna whack me. I wouldn’t have cared if he did. He could’ve whacked me and whacked me, like a kookaburra whacks a field mouse over a gum bough. At that moment I quite fancied the idea of becoming human pulp.

  ‘So what’s this about Greg Beer then?’ I asked him next. ‘Have you been busted or what? Why have you dragged me out here? Surely not just to finally ruin my faith in humanity?’

  Rennie chuckled, through what sounded like a wad of phlegm at the back of his throat. ‘People are stupid, Noel. What else can I say? But this Greg Beer bloke ... he’s not a person at all. He’s like a fuckin’ wolf.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He waited, Noel. He waited and he watched. You mad bastards at that pub of yours must’ve really upset him. That’s all I can put it down to. And then finally, by last night, he’d put the whole paperless trail together, from here to my mate’s holding shed on a farm in northern New South Wales.’

  ‘What? Did he show up here?’

  ‘No, no, nothin’ that obvious. He started at the other end first. If one more drop of beer leaves my mate’s shed for my joint, he’s gonna nab him good and proper. But that’s not really what he wants to do, is it, Noel?’

  I groaned, realising what Rennie was implying.

  ‘No,’ he went on. ‘He doesn’t even really care about me either. I might be big fry for some, but not for that dickhead. No, we’re talkin’ about something personal here, a grudge, a very old and festering wound. He wouldn’t know the first thing about taking on the likes of me anyway. I’m just collateral here. It’s just you he wants, Noel. And it’s you he’s gonna get.’

  ‘You know what, Rennie?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Greg Beer might be a cunt but you’re a cunt too.’

  ‘Watch your mouth, Noel.’

  ‘Nah. Why should I? What are ya gonna do? Drown me in a watertank? Butcher me like a lamb down in the signal-house on your spur there? Nuh, I haven’t been fed on fog like your dumb sheep, Rennie. I’m even dumber. I’ve been fed on bullshit. Your bullshit. And now I’m up to my ears in it. He’s gonna bust my Grand Hotel wide open, close it down for trading in black-market grog. You and your type might be used to the strip-search every time you go back into the clink but I’m certainly not. Do you hear me, Rennie? Do you realise what you’ve done?’

  Rennie Vigata placed his hands on his hips and snorted in contempt. ‘People are stupid, Noel,’ he repeated. ‘What more can I say?’

  ‘Obviously nothing much,’ I replied scornfully. ‘Do you think I don’t know that? Don’t you think that’s one of the reasons my hotel is the way it is?’

  ‘Well then catch up, dickhead. Come into the here and now. I never brought you out here to confess my sins, mate. I can tell you I’m well beyond needing to cleanse my soul. I brought you out here coz I like you. And more to the point, so does Lee. So I’m giving you the scoop. That prick’s gonna turn up at your pub any minute and blow your talking pissoir and all that other crazy shit away. Do you hear?’

  ‘Yeah, I hear, Rennie. But if you and Lee like me so much, how come you’ve been selling me bodgy grog all this time?’

  Rennie’s swarthy face creased into a smile. ‘Well everyone enjoyed it didn’t they?’

  ‘That’s beside the point!’ I yelled.

  ‘Is it? You bought it at a fair price, sold it on for a profit, everyone but Greg Beer had a whale of a time, so who cares? People are stupid.’

  ‘Will you stop saying that!’

  ‘Well they are.’

  I groaned again. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ I said despairingly, looking over at the hundreds of XXXX logos repeating on the pallets in front of me.

  ‘Anyway, Noel,’ Rennie said, ‘the point is you’ve got an option.’

  ‘Oh yeah? What, on a time-share in Siberia? You specialise in out-of-the-way places don’t you, Rennie?’

  ‘Will you stop that cheap shit for a second and listen. I’m serious,’ he said, also raising his voice.

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘Okay, fuck ya then!’ Rennie shouted, his temper exploding. ‘I’ve got a semi rollin’ in here tonight to get rid of all this shit, so I’ll be sweet. And because you and I worked on a handshake – coz that’s the way you wanted it, if you remember – they won’t pin anythin’ on me. But you, well, you’ll be rooted. You’ve got this Queensland shit in your pipes and all they’ll have to do is take it off to be tested. And no one around here’s game enough to give evidence you got it from me. So it’ll be your rap. You won’t even be able to plead ignorance, you stupid cunt.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Well what if I call the cops in Colac and tell them to come up here tonight to intercept the semi?’

  Rennie smiled. ‘You wouldn’t do that,’ he said, in a voice as flat as a basalt plain.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it would be pointless, that
’s why not. Do you think the Colac police don’t know who I am, Noel? How do you think I got the permits to have all the security lights on my fences? This is all national park round here and my track’s lit up like Bourke Street every night. How do ya think that’s possible? Do you think it was a clerical error or something, mate?’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ I said, dejected.

  Basically what Rennie was trying to tell me, in his traditionally charming manner, was that the police force was on his side but not on mine. And incredibly enough, it appeared to be true. Either way he was gonna get away with feeding The Grand Hotel hot liquor, so now he was extending an olive branch and offering me protection.

  I felt a telltale bead of sweat trickling down my spine. Suddenly this was getting heavy. ‘Okay, I’m listening,’ I said.

  Like all the great ideas in the history of Western culture what Rennie Vigata proposed to me over the next few minutes was quite beautiful in its simplicity. Greg Beer would get a call that same afternoon notifying him of his long wished-for promotion to senior sergeant. He’d be posted to Sydney to take up his new job and a ‘friendly’ policeman would be appointed as his replacement. If Greg Beer refused the position, his ambitious little career in the police force would be ruined. What was he going to choose, ruining The Grand Hotel over the advancement of his career? Not likely – not Greg Beer. Then, once he was single-handedly sorting out traffic and graffiti problems in the harbour city, Rennie and I would continue our little arrangement until we’d emptied the shed we were sitting in of its contents. Rennie wouldn’t take any more deliveries from up north and in the meantime I could settle on a new supplier – maybe that South Australian convent beer that The Dancing Brolga Ale had pipped at the post. Rennie’d turn his full attention to his fog-fed lambs and The Grand Hotel could continue on as if nothing had ever happened beyond an unforeseen change of beer in the tap.

  ‘So what do ya reckon?’ Rennie asked, jawing vigorously on his chewy now that he’d laid out his master plan. ‘I don’t have to do this for you, you know.’